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Spydey posted:How many languages do you speak? I assume you must have at least a smattering of Latin if you're reading in-depth into Milton (and, as you mentioned earlier, translating those insane memos the guy who last had your job left you with), but have you tried your tongue at anything else? I did my undergrad in English lit with a minor in Japanese language, also involving studying in Japan. You're probably more literarily competent than you think you are. If your current focus is English, then I'd suggest studying for the fluency exams or importing a bunch of YA manga or something of the sort with furigana in order to keep your Japanese skills up. You're going to have an odd time of things in a traditional English department if you chosse to go the grad school route, but it's not completely out of the question to focus on your translation skills by doing script work with an anime subbing group or something. Every little bit helps.
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May 11, 2009 16:51
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Grouco posted:Also, do have an opinion on any Canadian English grad programs? I've been researching specific faculty member's research interests, department focuses, etc, but I was wondering if you had any comment on department reps/research strengths? I can answer some of your questions, as I'm a PhD student at uOttawa. E-mail generalcannonhat[at]gmail.com .
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Jun 6, 2009 02:09
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PrinceofLowLight posted:I do research on schizophrenia, and just had the thought that that the mentality required to analyze literature is kind of like what a schizophrenic feels all the time. Seeing meaning to everything they notice, creating connections between unrelated objects and generally "magical" thinking. Any thoughts? Not only are you an idiot, you betray a fundamental misconception about what literary critics do.
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Jul 1, 2009 01:23
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PrinceofLowLight posted:You disagree with the idea that fictional characters exist in a world where minor details are usually put there intentionally in order to convey a certain message? You disagree that attention to character and detail have any real purpose?
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Jul 1, 2009 06:16
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PrinceofLowLight posted:I'm just putting forward the idea that literary analysis is a controlled example of it. Yet you refuse to even read what anybody says in defense of literary analysis, display no aptitude towards it on your own, and have taken no initiative towards exemplifying your narrow oversimplification of the discipline. Either try harder, add some content, or go home. Brainworm: you do economic readings of early modern lit, right? How far have you gone with history of the book stuff in that area. I've been rereading notes lately in preparation for my renaissance comp from a class I took with Donald Beecher on renaissance prose fiction, and I'm curious whether anybody's been able to effectively correlate the economic factors between Shakespeare and his sources when his sources were popular protonovels (like "The Winter's Tale" and "As You Like It"). I know that most people stop at "Shakespeare cribbed X," but I'm curious about what you have to say about both the quality of the source material and reciprocal reading.
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Jul 2, 2009 00:44
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Brainworm posted:So it sounds like you've got a good opening for some research if you want to follow up the economic contexts of emerging prose narratives, since I can't think of anyone who's staked a claim there. That's a good way of thinking of it. Unfortunately (well, for you at least), my dissertation project is thoroughly medieval, and will probably only focus on economics as a matter of fact rather than as a matter of content. I do find it very strange, however, that book history and history of the novel people so willfully blind themselves to pretty much anything written before the interregnum, and the renaissance is currently a critical dead zone for non-cannonical or non-aristrocratic texts in a way that analyses of anything either before or after it isn't. If you've got time, though, I'd strongly recommend looking at some of the Jacobean stuff like Ornatus and Artesia or A Marguerite of America (which ought to be available on EEBO). They're short, they're funny, they read as cleanly as Chaucer, and they're common. If your project still involves pressing on economics, this sort of thing can actually help give you the comforting sense of a 'reading public' that tends to be sorely lacking in early modern historicism.
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Jul 2, 2009 05:01
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Brainworm posted:I haven't read either of these yet, but I get into lots of common prose narratives. So I'll check them out. I'd recommend Godwin's Man in the Moon. Turns out moon men love American tobacco. Who knew? Start with O+A. Chapter 1 has titties, and it gets better from there.
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Jul 2, 2009 13:26
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Doran Blackdawn posted:Just remembered a question that's been bugging me since High school: Isn't it obvious that the whole point of the poem is that he's justly punished for his lack of respect for nature? The Albatross is hung around the mariner's neck as a symbol of his transgression. Mind, the poem's about lots of other things, too.
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Jul 3, 2009 17:26
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Lazaruise posted:What books do you recommend reading for someone who wishes to be an English major? Pretty much anything as long as you keep reading.
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Aug 7, 2009 14:16
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Captain Frigate posted:I'm also a little unclear on the subject of authorial intent. It seems to me that while it's certainly possible to get something out of a work that the author did not intentionally put in, looking at the work from the perspective of the author can give a number of insights about it. Like, from looking at the various Twilight threads around the forums, it looks like Stephanie Meyer read Wuthering Heights as an example of a romance where everything works out for the most part and the desirable outcome is reached. But you yourself seem to advocate interpreting the works of Shakespeare from his perspective, at least somewhat. You have spoken about how you don't think that the portrayal of Shylock is a damnation of the endemic anti-Semitism in Elizabethan society because that was not something that the author would have concerned himself with, and (I think) have voiced similar opinions on some of the more modern interpretations of Caliban. I'm just not sure why observing a work from the author's perspective has to be mutually exclusive to observing it from one's own perspective. Or am I completely off the mark here? The short answer is that even if Shylock is not portrayed in a way which suggests that Shakespeare had anything to say about the impression of Jews in his era, the words of the play itself nevertheless suggest that Jewsish religious autonomy can be tampered with unproblematically and because they're Jewish. Historicist approaches such as Brainworm's are the major go-to point for contemporary criticism, but it is worth noting that historicism does not supercede all possible approaches to texts. Nor does it account for the many ways texts have been read in the past. Adding authorial intent to this, especially when it cannot be known, such as in Shakespeare's case, just makes everything needlessly complicated for no good reason. For example, about the only reason why nobody seriously reads The Lord of the Rings as Christian allegory is because J.R.R. told everybody not to and his son is the most important Tolkien scholar alive right now. I would be shocked if nobody explicated this in significant detail ~50 years from now when all the important parties are dead.
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Dec 1, 2009 09:04
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HappyKitty posted:What kind of a rep do Canadian English departments have in American ones? For the most part, it seems that Canadian English departments are rather congenial to other Canadian English departments (particularly the big ones, like McGill, U of T, UBC, Dal), but I wonder how much of a name some of those same universities have down in the States. Are you actually *at* uOttawa? Because I am, too, and this is a thing I've been very much concerned about as I finish up my diss.
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Feb 9, 2013 07:49
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", or is university affiliation not A Thing To Worry About(tm)?
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HappyKitty posted:Yes, I am. In the English department? Yup.
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Feb 10, 2013 10:13
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HappyKitty posted:Hit me up at csamp074 at you know the rest. Now I'm curious. done. If you didn't get it, my email is in my profile. Mr. Spooky fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Feb 11, 2013 |
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Feb 11, 2013 20:57
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Food Court Druid posted:I'm a grad student in the English Department at Carleton. 'sup, fellow Ottawa goons. I did my MA there. I really miss the atmosphere. It invigorated me very much.
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Feb 12, 2013 16:42
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ceaselessfuture posted:Dear Brainworm, I just taught this play last winter, so if it's alright, I'll jump in here a little bit. There are, I think, two good (and unrelated) reasons why this is a classic play. The first is formal. Although the play is clearly a satire, it's also clearly *funny*. Unlike eg. Shakespeare, most of the jokes in the play don't need to be explained. Moreover, The Importance of Being Earnest is a very strong demonstration of Wilde's Aestheticism without any of the homoeroticism of The Picture of Dorian Gray, so for some audiences it's a little bit more approachable. Finally, as a three-act play, Earnest has a really solid structure of problem-complication-resolution, which makes it a solid text to teach dramatic tension and plot structure as part of literary form. More importantly, though, I think the value of the text is moral. As a rule, Wilde tends to gesture towards the existence of moral questions in his writing before he goes off to do something really witty. In The Importance of Being Earnest, though, you've got this development of a really interesting, and *really* ambiguous, social situation where literally every main character lies through their teeth. All the time. This is most evident in the two sets of male-female pairs. Jack and Algie are both liars, but as Algie discovers in Act 1, Jack is a "Bunburyist" who, critically, refuses to admit it, even to himself. Likewise, Cecily is so absurdly romantic that she knows she deludes herself, while Gwendolyn's outrageous pontifications suggest that her self-awareness, like Jack's, is suspect. We get a sense that deception is common to everyone in 'society' with Lady Bracknell, but even she seems to be aware that society's masks are used to to divert attention from very real social problems (as when she says that if education had any social effects at all, "it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square"). We can see one example of how this works out in a practical sense when we find out at the very end of the play that Miss Prism, Cecily's tutor, once stuffed an infant in a handbag and left it in a railway station. For me, the point of the play isn't that all its characters engage in some form of deception, but rather that some kinds of deception are crueller than others. Algie and Cecily are very aware of what they do to manipulate others, and consequently they tend to be manipulative in ways that let them navigate society according to their own rules. Jack, however (and to a lesser extent Gwendolyn), tends to deceive and manipulate others in ways that cause genuine distress. When Jack arrives at his country house, for example, having decided to 'kill' Earnest, he takes things so far that the entire cast is about to go change into mourning clothes before Algie shows up. Gwendolyn, likewise, is so selfishly bossy that Jack actually goes to the vicar to schedule a christening for himself in order to render himself marrigeable to her. So, what I think is one of the really interesting questions that comes from this play is "to what extent is earnestness important?" Victorian culture was *all about* earnestness (in pretty much everything), but we find that the most earnest characters in this play are actually the most morally suspect just as we find that the characters who are most superficial are actually much more harmless than they appear to be. Couple this moral ambiguity with a mild subtext suggesting that the values of the idle rich are deeply pernicious, and you have a play that provides the impetus for a lot of discussion.
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Aug 21, 2013 22:11
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big business sloth posted:Also, seeing it performed helps. Watching a man consume something like 20 cucumber sandwiches in about five minutes is pretty funny. Yes it is!
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Aug 22, 2013 20:21
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